Note: Once again, posting before some of the London Games’ events were aired, Wednesday.
PGA Golf Championship Quiz: 1) Short-term memory check…who won the last three PGAs and who was runner-up? 2) John Daly defeated what solid player in 1991 for his dramatic win at Crooked Stick? 3) Who was the only golfer to win two PGAs in the 1980s? Answer below.
Olympics Coverage
My girl* did it! Allyson Felix won the 200 meters final, besting Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, with America’s Carmelita Jeter taking the bronze to go along with her silver in the 100, the event Fraser-Pryce won.
*OK, so only ten million others call Allyson their girl. Can’t you give me this one fantasy?! I’m old, would take 60 seconds to run what she did in 21.88, and I only have about 24.35 years left. [Plus it’s not as if my Jets or Mets are about to win any titles in that time.]
Usain Bolt
“Before the start, the crowd would not make a sound. How could 80,000 people be this quiet?
“ ‘You could hear a pin drop,’ American sprinter Justin Gatlin said later.”
“After the race, the crowd would not leave, even with only one event still going. Do you think they were waiting to see who won the hammer throw?
“Usain Bolt was taking his encore lap. He shot his invisible arrow. He spread his arms. He posed. He mugged. He did all the compulsory Bolt routines. That, he would say later, is what all those people up in the stands pay to see.
“ ‘I knew it was going to be like this,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was going to be like this.’
“There are 10,000 Olympians in this town. There are VIPs and celebrities and rich and prominent champions of every stripe. There are princes and sheikhs and prime ministers and NBA players.
“But there is no glow quite like Bolt’s glow, not another star in this world like him.
“It is a most peculiar way to be globally renowned – ten seconds of greatness. Rinse and repeat, if you can, every four years.
“He does not have a long pennant race or best-of-seven series or four majors. He has 10 seconds. Actually a fraction less. Who gets this big in 10 seconds? Michael Phelps needs several days and many, many strokes. Phelps hardly gets wet in 10 seconds.
“ ‘This is what I do,’ Bolt said. Perhaps in an age of Twitter, as the human attention span shrinks like cotton in the wash, Bolt is the perfect icon. Anyone can pay attention to anything for 10 seconds.”
“When he won the 100-meter dash in the second-fastest time in history Sunday night, Usain Bolt sent the 80,000 who witnessed his feat in person and the millions more who watched it on television into a state of delirium. Bolt’s feat raised the old grade-school axiom ‘Wanna race?’ to athletic nirvana.
“But even before his gold medal ceremony here Monday night, that state of euphoria was pierced with variations of the same cynical question: ‘Is he clean?’
“When I called home Monday to talk about one of the most surreal events I’ve ever covered, everyone wanted to know whether the fastest human alive was someone they could truly believe in? Is he free of any illegal performance-enhancer that might make a man capable of posting 9.95 seconds suddenly able to go, oh, 9.63 seconds – Bolt’s Olympic-record winning time?
“So Monday night at Olympics Stadium, I asked a dozen current and three former Olympians what they thought. Several were bothered I asked, saying it was unfair to Bolt, who has never tested positive for anything illegal and has welcomed any and all testing procedures since the lead-up to the Beijing Games in 2008. But most of the current Olympians, who have had to defend themselves and teammates against drug allegations, understand it’s now part of the landscape….
“Said Billy Mills, the U.S. gold medalist at 10,000 meters in 1964: ‘I don’t think he’s on any kind of performance-enhancing drugs. I just think he’s borderline inhuman. He’s just an incredible athlete.’…
“This skeptical environment is a byproduct of busted world-class sprinters Ben Johnson, Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery. This is the can’t-believe-what-we-see world Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative chemist Victor Conte has given us.”
Of course the same suspicions were foisted on Chinese swimming 15-year-old sensation Ye Shiwen and 15-year-old Katie Ledecky after they won their events.
Alas, Bolt’s test (and those of the other medal winners) “were presumably driven to a mammoth, 15,000-foot laboratory 45 minutes north of London, where a $30 million facility partly run and staffed by the drug-company conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline (Olympic organizers actually sold sponsorship to a drug lab for the first time in history) have begun running an estimated 5,000 blood and urine tests for the athletes of the London Games.
“As nervous as Bolt’s fans were before the gun went off Sunday night, the negative-test results from that lab ultimately confirm the final result: that the great Jamaican sprinter, who rescued many of our imaginations after the sport’s greatest sprinters were found to have cheated their peers and their public, was the real, chemical-free deal.”
I, like Mike Wise, believe Bolt is clean. And as Wise writes, “For track, the Games and beyond, he needs to be clean. Only the validity of true Olympic athletic achievement, encompassing every sport and every athlete, is at stake.”
But the other day I congratulated Tyson Gay and Ryan Bailey for finishing fourth and fifth. Ordinarily that is hardly worthy of plaudits.
Just understand that in this era of Bolt, as Mike Wise put it in another column, think about Yohan Blake, Gatlin, Gay and even Bailey (I’m including him, not Wise).
“Like Joe Frazier and George Foreman during Ali’s reign or Karl Malone and Patrick Ewing during Jordan’s era, Gay, Gatlin and Blake would have been remembered as the greatest champions of their time if they had just been born 10 years earlier or later.
“But this is Bolt’s time, his world – and they’re just getting passed in it.”
Going back to some of what Lopresti wrote, Al Michaels was on “Today” the other morning and was asked what he thought was the greatest moment of the Games thus far and he said without hesitation, Bolt, going on to add what any sports fan knows….it is just so difficult to repeat, especially in his sport, and do it at world record level.
—Taoufik Makhloufi, an Algerian favored in the 1500 meters, was ejected over his “failure to compete honestly” in the 800m where he did not finish the face.
But then he was reinstated when the Algerian federation insisted he had a knee problem and that organizers knew about it.
So he won his 1500m semi-final but was forced to run in the 800m after he failed to withdraw before a deadline on Sunday, Makhloufi wanting to concentrate on the 1500.
Then, during the 800, he started off slowly and slowed to a jog after barely a lap. He finally stopped altogether and wandered off the rack.
Officials threw him out of the Games for this non-effort, but then the disqualification was revoked in a total sham deal where the Algerians said Makhloufi had a prior knee injury.
So look what happened…the same Makhloufi won the freakin’ 1500! Unbelievable. Thankfully, the U.S.’s Leo Manzano had a stirring stretch run, sixth in the final turn before finishing second for the silver.
[Luke A., a college runner I met four years ago in Eugene, Ore., at the U.S. Olympic Trials, says there is no doubt Makhloufi is a doper. I concur.]
“In the end, the most hyped Olympian was also the most alone.
“Lolo Jones finished the 100-meter hurdles in a desperate lunge, stood by the finish line staring up at an Olympic Stadium scoreboard that registered a fourth-place finish and then slowly walked away.
“She didn’t stick around to congratulate the two medal-winning Americans, both of whom had questioned her enormous pre-race publicity. She didn’t hang out to schmooze with fans who have increasingly questioned her sincerity. The cloudy and cool London skies broke into a steady drizzle as she walked into a tunnel and fought back tears.
“ ‘I guess all the people who were talking about me, they can have their night and laugh about me,’ she said.
“It’s a nasty business, this Olympic star-making machine. These athletes have one chance every four years to rake in the real gold, the endorsement and appearance money that helps compensate them for years of training. Most agree they would be fools to turn down that chance to capitalize on their success and enhance the quality of their often budget-strained lives.
“Yet when Olympic athletes seek and embrace this publicity, they are criticized unless they have the medals to back it up….
“The way she was viewed by many, anything less than a gold medal followed by a marriage proposal from Tim Tebow followed by a pole dance would have been a disappointment….
“Put it another way: This was the only Olympian who went on national television and wondered about asking Tebow for a date….
“But by the time she arrived in London, the inevitable backlash had begun…Media stories probably fueled by resentful teammates popped up everywhere, including a particularly scathing rip in the New York Times. The essence of the criticism was that Jones wasn’t good enough to sell herself so much….
“These attacks appear to come from jealousy from those track athletes who think that Jones has unfairly sucked all the air out of their moment. As if it were her fault that Rolling Stone, ABC and HBO wanted her under their microscope. As if she should have refused a chance to make some money off her low-paying sport because others thought she had not earned it.”
It’s true that when it came to some of the post-race comments from silver medalist Dawn Harper and Kellie Wells (bronze), there was some pettiness to them, like Wells saying: “Like I’ve told everybody else, if you’re watching Lolo, you’re watching me, and I’m doing my job pretty well.”
“It seems to me that Lolo Jones’ biggest crime on Tuesday, as it has been for consecutive Olympics, is that she just wasn’t good enough. So what? And if she’s still able to cash some checks off her fourth-place finish, good for her.”
On this one, I’m opting for my 24-hour rule. This is a complicated issue. I saw Lolo’s appearance on “Today” the morning after when she basically broke down there, too.
But it’s a fact Jones didn’t make an effort to congratulate Harper and Wells after the race, which is bush league. I also don’t know enough about the dynamics behind the scenes to say anything about the behavior of Harper and Wells, other than to note in some venues they seemed to take too much satisfaction in defeating Jones.
[Australia’s Sally Pearson won the 100 hurdles, by the way, thus saving her underachieving from mass suicide.]
–UK Sport, the funding agency for elite athletes, had predicted between 40 and 70 medals in exchange for a public investment of some $450 million in sports in the four-year Olympic cycle.
–I have to admit…I’m not a big fan of beach volleyball, but that Misty May-Treanor/Kerri Walsh-Jennings match against the Chinese on Tuesday was outstanding. And kudos to the Chinese for exhibiting great sportsmanship afterwards.
So then we had Misty and Keri going up against the other Americans, April Ross and Jennifer Kessy. Misty and Kerri won, their third Olympic gold, 21-16, 21-16.
–The U.S. men embarrassed themselves in not having a single runner qualify for the 400 meters final, but what a tremendous story with Grenada’s Kirani James winning gold, his nation’s first Olympic medal (and thank you, Tom Hammond, for mentioning that the natives are very grateful for Ronald Reagan’s little invasion that saved many on that island from tyranny, or worse).
–Congrats to Michael Tinsley in at least gaining the U.S. a silver in the 400m hurdles.
–And to Jenn Suhr for her gold in the pole vault!
–And Aly Raisman, the Jewish-American gymnast who not only won gold with her floor exercise routine, while picking up a bronze in the balance beam on Tuesday, but she also invoked the memory of the Israeli athletes killed 40 years ago in Munich.
After the IOC refused to have a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies, Raisman said, “If there had been a moment’s silence, I would have supported it and respected it.”
Raisman picked the folk song “Hava Nagila” for her gold medal-winning routine, saying, “I am Jewish, that’s why I wanted that floor music.”
–And not for nothing, but nice effort by the Netherlands’ Epke Zonderland in gaining his country’s first-ever medal in gymnastics, gold, as he soared in the horizontal bar event.
–But what a choke job…2011 world champion Jesse Williams in the high jump. He barely made the team at rainy Eugene, blaming the conditions (the same conditions everyone else had to participate in), and then on Tuesday, you could see the pressure etched on his face. He didn’t handle it as he flamed out at a height he should have cleared easily. Thankfully, though, Erik Kynard of the U.S. picked up the silver….so we were getting some medals from unexpected sources.
–As for Wednesday’s action…super start for America’s decathletes, Ashton Eaton and Trey Hardee, one-two after the first day.
–American LaShinda Demus took silver in the women’s 400 hurdles.
—Bolt and Yohan Blake looked rather impressive in the 200 semis, but only Wallace Spearmon qualified among the three Americans for the final, which sucks. Spearmon, though, hopefully takes the bronze.
—Aries Merritt (Gold) and Jason Richardson (Silver) did the U.S. proud in the 110m hurdles.
Ball Bits
—Derek Jeter is just a few hits away from tying one of the better all-time records in baseball history…Hank Aaron’s 17 consecutive seasons with at least 150 hits. [Thru Tuesday’s play, Jeter was at 143 for the year…3,231 hits for his career.]
–Nice game, Justin Verlander (12-7) against the Yankees the other night…8 innings, 0 earned runs, 14 strikeouts. That’s the guy you don’t want to face in the playoffs, especially at home.
–I have totally lost interest in baseball the last week or so, especially once track got started in London, that I didn’t even think about the Mets once on Tuesday…as in I totally forgot they were even on…so if I’m feeling that way about the team, imagine what others are thinking. Yes, good seats are available the rest of the year.
[I then turned the Mets on, Wednesday, to watch the start of their game against the Marlins before NBC’s coverage of the Games began, and pitcher Chris Young promptly gave up two home runs in the top of the first to Miami, at which point I said, ‘Sayonara, Metsies.’]
–I am way psyched to watch the action at the PGA Championship this weekend on the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, having played there about five times myself over the years, going back to my PIMCO days, plus 2009 and 2011 tied to my participation in the Kiawah half-marathon.
I love the course and while I’m a hack golfer I’ve had some success, all things considered, including using rental clubs. I mean I’ve had some pars and avoided losing a foot or hand with all the alligators lurking in the reeds.
But the guys this week are playing a totally different course than my white tees, from outrageous lengths, with the potential for big winds late in the day for the leaders on Saturday and Sunday.
And will we finally break the streak of 16 different winners in the last 16 majors? Here’s hoping so, for the sake of the sport.
–One side story to Kiawah is the whole topic of logistics…as in anyone who has been to the island has the same thought. How the heck do 30,000 people a day maneuver around an island with just one main two-lane road? Even Tiger Woods said on Tuesday, “I don’t know how the spectators are going to get around this place. First of all, I don’t know how they’re going to get to it.”
Kiawah is 20 miles from Charleston and has only about 1,700 full-time residents. All the players, however, won’t have to deal with traffic issues as the PGA of America arranged for them to stay at homes on the island.
–When I posted last Sunday, I didn’t know about the death at Pocono Raceway (Pa.) as a lightning bolt hit the parking lot after a chaotic end to the NASCAR race that day. Nine others were injured.
I’m a weather freak and knew there was stuff around as they raced at Pocono (about 1 ½ hours from my place) and saw the radar and wondered how they would handle the race (which I didn’t watch).
Not well, it turns out. There were severe weather forecasts for the entire area, including Pocono, but NASCAR got enough laps in before calling the race (with Jeff Gordon winning his first of the year, and No. 86 for his career).
The thing is track officials evidently advised the crowd to take cover several times when storms threatened near the end of the event but some said they didn’t hear the warnings, which is understandable. It’s not always easy hearing stuff at these tracks.
According to Dan Gelston of the AP: “A severe storm warning was issued for the area at 4:12 p.m. and NASCAR called the face at 4:54 p.m.”
The question is, should NASCAR have called the race earlier, knowing what was about to hit, even though the track was dry?
–It’s early, but Tim Tebow is off to an awful start in training camp for the New York Jets and former Jets quarterback Boomer Esiason said on Monday, “You want to know if I were the Jets what I would do? I would cut Tim Tebow. I really would. And I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not in any way, shape or form, I think, benefiting this team.”
–Tragic story in the world of basketball. Former NBA All-Star Dan Roundfield drowned in Aruba trying to save his wife as she struggled in rough water. His wife was saved by a U.S. tourist snorkeling nearby.
I loved the way the 6’8” center-forward played the game, bouncing all over the place. Roundfield played 11 seasons for Indiana, Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, averaging 15 points per game for his career. He was a three-time All-Star.
Former Hawks teammate Dominique Wilkins called Roundfield the “most honest and upfront person I knew. He taught me how to be a professional and took me under his wing. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family, I will truly miss him.”
–Another story on how it’s not necessary to hydrate to excess, this one from Jon R. Anderson of Military Times.
“Everything you know about hydration is wrong. That’s the message from the prestigious British Medical Journal…which has published new research that throws cold water on everything from when to tank up to the truth about sports drinks….
“Indeed, with warrior-athletes among the most frequent sports drink consumers – even while fighting a daily battle for hydration in hot spots around the world – the mantra of ‘hydrate or die’ isn’t just a sales slogan for those in uniform.
“ ‘Prehydrate; drink ahead of thirst; train your gut to tolerate more fluid; your brain doesn’t know you’re thirsty – the public and athletes alike are bombarded with messages about what they should drink, and when, during exercise,’ reads the opening salvo of one study.
“It’s all so much sweat-soaked poppycock, Oxford University researchers conclude in a clutch of studies featured in the July issue of the journal. Among their findings:
“Prehydration: It may sound scientific, but there’s no evidence that chugging fluids before exercise does anything more than give you a belly full of water sloshing around. If anything, it slows you down and puts you at serious risk of overhydration.
“Obey your thirst: ‘Your brain may know a lot, but it doesn’t know when your body is thirsty,’ reads the Gatorade website. Not true, according to researchers. ‘Drinking ahead of thirst may worsen performance in endurance exercise and carries a rare but serious risk’ of overhydration….
“Dr. Timothy Noakes (author of “Waterlogged: The Serious Problem of Overhydration in Endurance Sports’).
“ ‘We don’t need to be told when to drink – our bodies will tell us….My argument is dehydration is a non-disease created in order to sell a product.’”
— “House cats kill more critters than thought”
“That mouse carcass Kitty presents you with is just the tip of a very bloody iceberg. When researchers attached kittycams to house cats, they found a secret world of slaughter.
“While only 30% of roaming house cats kill prey – two animals a week on average – they are still slaying more wildlife than previously believed, according to research from the University of Georgia.
“Wildlife advocates say it is a frightening level of feline foul play. Based on a U.S. house-cat population of 74 million, ‘cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American birds species are in decline,’ says George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy.”
Previous estimates were too conservative “because they didn’t include the animals that cats ate or left behind,’ Univ. of Georgia researcher Kerrie Anne Loyd (sic) says.
“The cats brought home just under a quarter of what they killed, ate 30% and left 49% to rot where they died.
“The carnage cuts across species. Lizards, snakes and frogs made up 41% of the animals killed, Loyd and fellow researcher Sonia Hernandez found. Mammals such as chipmunks and voles were 25%, insects and worms 20% and birds 12%.”
The researchers are presenting their findings to The Hague where cats will go on trial for animal genocide. Housecats deserve the maximum…the end of their species.
Preemptively, Housecats also fall to No. 174 on the All-Species List. The Vole rises to No. 76, admittedly a sympathy vote for the little guy who has operated in the shadows for thousands of years, asking for nothing more than a little space and some weed.
–Distressing story from the New York Times’ Gardiner Harris concerning “free-roaming dogs” that “number in the tens of millions and bite millions of people annually” in India.
“No country has as many stray dogs as India, and no country suffers as much from them,” writes Harris.
“An estimated 20,000 people die every year from rabies infections – more than a third of the global rabies toll.
“Packs of strays lurk in public parks, guard alleyways and street corners and howl nightly in neighborhoods and villages. Joggers carry bamboo rods to beat them away, and bicyclists fill their pockets with stones to throw at chasers. Walking a pet dog here can be akin to swimming with sharks.
“A 2001 law forbade the killing of dogs, and the stray population has increased so much that officials across the country have expressed alarm.”
With all due respect to my readers in India, you have to get rid of the strays. Geezuz, we aren’t talking one or two like in most of America; future shelter dog adoptions, one hopes. But animal welfare advocates “fervently reject euthanasia, and some warn that reducing the stray population while doing nothing about the country’s vast mounds of garbage could be dangerous because rats might thrive in dogs’ place.”
This gives me further reason not to want to go to India after being there for a lengthy stay in 1985. As for the All-Species List, this isn’t Dogs’ fault. They remain No. 1, though sometimes slipping to No. 2, replaced by the Gibbon.
–And lastly on the animal front, the other day in the nearby Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, “A rabid beaver attacked a swimming Boy Scout leader, two hours after also attacking a canoeist, park officials said.”
Good lord. The Boy Scout leader suffered “15 lacerations to his body in the attack… ‘He said, out of nowhere something came up and bit him in the chest,’ said a park spokesman.
“The Boy Scout leader told authorities he was bitten on his backside, his leg and arm by the frenzied beaver.”
Geezuz, the four scouts with their leader had to beat the beaver to death as it wouldn’t let go of their leader’s arm. [NBC News 4]
Well, this presents a tough situation for your editor. The Beaver, despite being a mere rodent, has consistently been in the top ten of the All-Species List, and it’s not necessarily his fault (just as is the case with dogs in India) that this particular one was rabid.
But I’m placing the beaver on double-secret probation. He needs to keep a clean record the rest of the summer, at which point he will be back in the good graces of the All-Species List Commission (ASLC), headquartered in Beaver Falls, Pa.
–Houston, we have us another “Jerk of the Year” candidate, Dwight Howard, who USA TODAY (and the Orlando Sentinel) reports has skipped his own youth basketball camp in Orlando, choosing instead to rehab his back in Southern California.
“Predictably, the decision is not sitting well with many of the families who paid $199 to register for the camp.”
The thing is, “campers were promised a Howard autograph among other goodies.
“Compounding the disappointment and anger, Howard has been spotted at several Los Angeles Dodgers games in recent weeks and also took in part of the Adidas Nations tournament in Long Beach over the weekend.”
–Yikes! My man Randy Travis got himself in a heap of trouble down North Texas way. He was accused of drunk driving and threatened to kill state troopers after he crashed his car and was found naked and combative at the scene. It’s been a tough stretch for him, and just about three years since I saw him in concert here in New Jersey where he was terrific. Get your life together, Randy.
–Lastly, we note the death of composer Marvin Hamlisch, 68, after a brief illness, according to his family. Broadway, movies, he did it all. “A Chorus Line” earned him a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. “The Way We Were” for the 1973 Sydney Pollack romantic drama starring Redford and Streisand won Hamlisch an Academy Award. An Oscar for “The Sting.” And he composed “Nobody Does It Better” for the 1977 Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.”
I didn’t realize, though, that Hamlisch’s first movie credit was “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” a tune Lesley Gore sang in the 1965 comedy “Ski Party.”
Top 3 songs for the week 8/8/70: #1 “(They Long To Be) Close To You” (Carpenters…oooh-waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaa….close to youuuuuu….do-do-do-doooo….) #2 “Make It With You” (Bread…schmaltz week) #3 “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” (Stevie Wonder…sucked…c’mon, Stevie…you can do better)…and…#4 “Spill The Wine” (Eric Burdon and War…Mr. Burdon being the ugliest, yet among the best, lead singers of all times, as Cassius Clay would say) #5 “Band of Gold” (Freda Payne…solid effort on Freda’s part) #6 “Mama Told Me (Not To Come)” (Three Dog Night) #7 “Tighter, Tighter” (Alive & Kicking…I can’t believe I had to look this one up…didn’t recognize the group’s name, a classic one-hit wonder) #8 “The Love You Save” (The Jackson 5…Michael is dead, you know….big fight over the estate…Janet has her fangs out… rrrraghhh!) #9 “Ball Of Confusion” (The Temptations…not my favorite of theirs…they also know themselves it blows compared to their other work) #10 “O-o-h Child” (The 5 Stairsteps…has held up better than I would have thought …But you know what tune I was listening to the other day?… “Smiling Faces” by Undisputed Truth, a #3 one-hit wonder from 1971…this is what I love about the 60s, loosely defined….listen to this tune again. It’s really great…with a ton going on, musically. I mean these guys weren’t some minor league act, they knew what they were doing, but they only get this one song….)
PGA Golf Championship Quiz Answers: 1) Last three winners: 2009 – Y.E. Yang over Tiger Woods; 2010 – Martin Kaymer over Bubba Watson; 2011 – Keegan Bradley over Jason Dufner. 2) In 1991 (can you believe it’s been this long?), John Daly defeated Bruce Lietzke. 3) Larry Nelson (1981, 87) is the only one to win two in the 1980s.
